Colleen’s Blog

Did you know closing ratios on deals that employ traditional selling methods (e.g., cold calls and direct mail) have not changed since the 1980s? Seriously. They’ve not budged at all since “Eye of the Tiger” was a hit song on the radio. And yet there are still salespeople and team leaders today—four decades later—who remain stubbornly fixated on this entirely outdated way of looking at sales.

I recently had a conversation with a really smart sales VP who said, "I need my team to remember that our job is to provoke our customers. It's to make people think. It's to bring them new ideas that they had never thought about before."

Are you pushing the sale too hard with your prospects and clients? Look, we all know sales is about persistence. Sometimes though, sellers don't know when to slow down on that persistence and actually repel the client away.

Are you clear on your prospecting? You're probably familiar with the saying "always be closing."

In every sales territory and in every organization, there's a hidden danger—one that has the potential to be lethal if left unchecked. It emerges only when "the unexpected" occurs. That's usually something big and potentially destabilizing. It could take the form of a sudden severe weather event, a change in management, a shift in organizational priorities in your client's company, or even a downturn in one or more sectors of the economy.

I want to share with you a concerning trend involving your prospects’ trust and what you can do to fix it.  We are indeed seeing issues involving trust from buyers right now. Who can blame them? It's an incredibly volatile marketplace and it's going to continue this way for some time. However, it’s important for us to recognize that buyers currently lack trust not necessarily because they lack trust in you, but because they lack trust in themselves.

Building trust with clients should be at the forefront of every organization's thinking and planning.